(1) Technical Field
This invention generally relates to the field of sensing an elastically deformed surface. More specifically a method of dynamically monitoring a shape while it is being actively deformed.
(2) Background
The problem of deformable material shape control and sensing has been studied most widely in the context of adaptive optics and segmented mirror telescopes using brute force approximations and sub-optimal over-engineering approaches for placement of and sensors and actuators. See, for example, G. Chanan, D. G. Mac Martin, J. Nelson, T. Mast, Control and Alignment of Segmented Mirror Telescopes: Matrices, Modes, and Error Propagation, Applied Optics, Vol. 43, No. 6, February 2004; and M. A. Van Dam, R. G. Lane, Extended Analysis of Curvature Sensing, J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 19, 13901397, 2002.
Conventional methods for shape sensing of deformable materials involve dense surface shape sensing. In order to achieve dense surface shape sensing, one has to resort to either dense range sensing or photogrammetric methods that reconstruct the three-dimensional (3-D) shape of a surface from stereoscopic views of the surface shape. These methods require high dimensional sensor information. Both range: scanning and 3-D stereoscopic photogrammetry require costly equipment, dense sensing structures and computationally expensive sensor data processing stage.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a system that is capable of precision shape sensing with minimal system complexity. Furthermore, there is a need for a sensing paradigm that allows for real-time sensing of 3-D shapes with only a sparse set of simple sensors.